digiKam 0.10.0 release for KDE4

digiKam is also available for Windows. Precompiled packages can be donwloaded with KDE-Windows installer. See KDE-Windows project for details.

See below the list of new features and bugs-fix coming with this release:

NEW FEATURES (since 0.9.x series):

General : Ported to CMake/Qt4/KDE4.General : Thumbs KIO-Slave removed. digiKam now use multi-threading to generate thumnails.General : Removed all X11 library dependencies. Code is now portable under MACOS-X and Win32.General : Support of XMP metadata (require Exiv2 library >= 0.16).General : Hardware handling using KDE4 Solid interface.General : Preview of Video and Audio files using KDE4 Phonon interface.General : Database file can be stored on a customized place to support remote album library path.General : New database schema to host more photo and collection informations.General : Database interface fully re-written using Qt4 SQL plugin.General : Support of multiple roots album paths.General : Physical root albums are managed as real album.General : New option in Help menu to list all RAW file formats supported.General : Geolocation of pictures from sidebars is now delegate to KDE4 Marble widget.General : New option in Help menu to list all main components/libraries used by digiKam.General : libkdcraw dependency updated to 0.4.0.General : libkexiv2 dependency updated to 0.5.0.General : Raw metadata can be edited, changed, added to TIFF/EP like RAW file formats (require Exiv2 >= 0.18). Currently DNG, NEF, and PEF raw files are supported. More will be added in the future.General : digiKam can be compiled natively under Microsoft Windows.General : libkdcraw dependency updated to 0.4.0.General : libgphoto2 dependency is now optional to be able to compile digiKam under operating systems not supported by GPhoto2.General : Usability improvements to be able to run digiKam on small screen (like EeePC).General : New option to enable RAW metadata writing.General : digiKamlinktree script updated to support new Database schema.General : All batch tools as rebuild all thumbs or sync metadata with database use modeless dialogs.General : Icon-View and Thumbbar items use a smart 3D decorative border.General : Fonts used by Icon-View, Folder-View, and Tooltip can be customized.General : Thumbbar item can be rated on the fly.General : New settings to fix file timestamp when metadata are saved.General : Sidebar type is configurable: title is visible for only active tab, or for all tabs.General : Internal CImg library updated to 1.3.0.General : New "DarkRoom" colors theme.

AlbumGUI : Added Thumbbar with Preview mode to easy navigate between pictures.AlbumGUI : Integration of Simple Text Search tool to left sidebar as Amarok.AlbumGUI : New advanced Search tools. Re-design of Search backend, based on XML. Re-design of search dialog for a better usability. Searches based on metadata and image properties are now possible.AlbumGUI : New fuzzy Search tools based on sketch drawing template. Fuzzy searches backend use an Haar wevelet interface. You simply draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and digiKam displays for you a thumbnail view of the best matches.AlbumGUI : New Search tools based on marble widget to find pictures over a map.AlbumGUI : New Search tools to find similar images against a reference image.AlbumGUI : New Search tools to find duplicates images around whole collections.AlbumGUI : Add Tool tips to display Physical albums properties.AlbumGUI : Icon view item can be rated on the fly.

hmm, let's see where to start. i've used digikam for quite some time now (about two years) and manage most of my private and some of my work photos with it. however a significant amount of photos i take during and for work still remains on my windows machine as a lot of programs we use at work won't work in wine. however two things happened today. at first i got an unexpected promotion (which is good) and then my windows machine died (which is not good). while the machine itself is toast after the power supply screwed up (there are burn marks on the mainboard...) at least i could salvage the disks. to not mess things up further i took them to work and put them into one of our test machines. they are ok and selftests give no errors but the filesystems are chaos. unfortunately i don't have backups of all my photos, just my personal ones (how do you backup almost 3TB anyway?) so i let the filesystem and selfanalysis checks run the whole day. now i'm back home and trying to sort things out. i decided to not set up another windows machine but put the disk in one of my linux hosts. i can mount them only in readonly but i wouldn't dare writing on them anyway. i'm not sure if it's important, but i dumped the filesystems to my raid and mount them via -o loop to not damage the real disks. now i got the problem the directory structure is destroyed, i got thousands of folders which have names of files and files which have names of folders or no names at all (just a 8 digit number). the first file i looked at is system.ini and it's actually a jpg file.
question: is there a way to let digikam scan through all files and folders regardless of the mess and use its hash database to keep the old tags and comments? i used a samba share to access the photos so the local digikam database is not damaged and i mounted the images on the same paths.
i thought about using find and file to restore every files to its type but i don't have the space to copy them somewhere and i'd rather avoid editing the images to enable readwrite mount although they are damaged.
so, has someone an idea on how to proceed? i know, i will have to look through all the files manually at some point but i would rather postpone this as far as possible for now.

I suggest that you start with rescue tools like "foremost" (http://foremost.sourceforge.net) what was originally developed by US government. Basicly with:

"foremost image.dd"
or then you can search all filetypes and pull them to wanted place.
"foremost -t all -o /to/rescue/dir -i image.dd"

You can try "autopsy" what is written in perl (www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy) and this you should run for disk image.

With Autospy you have tools to read data from disk image created with dd. Like ils (list inode information from the image), ffs (finds the file or directory name using the inode) and icat (outputs the file content based on its inode number).

So in short, first if you get the inode information, then you use ifind to get the file/directory name and then icat to output the content once you've worked out whether it was a file or directory you were looking at (tricky) and created somewhere to put the content.

Sleuthkit's fls command will list files and directoriy names from image.
Like: fls image.dd -r -f ext3 -i raw (replace needed filesystem). Then you can get some results with: "r/r * 10: myfile.txt"
And then trying to retrieve the content of this file: "icat -r -f ext3 -i raw image.dd 10>myfile.txt"
Or you can try using "sorter" script what allows you to search particular types of files, like RAW images etc.

There is alternative for dd tool for recovery like "ddrescue".
What you can try too. It is faster because it skips bad secors and after the whole disk it goes back to try to reread them. basicly it is just "ddrescue -n /dev/hda /media/recovery hdaimage.raw rescued.log"

Well, 3TB is lots of data, but it still should get backupped. Diskspace is bretty cheap these days, especially when talking about professional jobs.

There is still a part of this which is relevant to digikam: retaining tags. As far as I can tell DigiKam has no way to "fix" broken databases, even for very simple cases. e.g. I recently reinstalled, changing my username, as a consequence all of my tags became detached from their targets. I'm sure it;s possible to fiz somehow but it would be nice if there were an easy way to fix it from within DigiKam (particularly if DigiKam would prompt the user when it found discrepencies).

it seems i didn't explain the problem properly, so i will try again (and hopefully succeed this time). only the directory structure and the files and folders names are mangled, the files themselves luckily are still there. the filesystems are ntfs so i had to use the windows tools to check and repair them. now instead of a nice organized folder hierarchy i just got 128 folder in with each having 256 or 512 subfolders. files and folders lost their names, timestamps and access rights but the file contexts are intact. it seems the names of all files which were more than three folders deep are lost, which makes all my photos. as some of the filenames are recycled in many of the folders i started adding all the types to the digikam config page and it works, despite being .dll or .exe files they are recognized and sorted properly. however there are thousands of tiletypes and files named like "februar" (february in german) i can't seem to get recognized at all. for as long as possible i will refrain from making any changes to the dumps or the original disks until i have prove that files have been lost.

You can try photorec from testdisk project - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec It's great tool for such file recovery. It can get the file types you need by searching for example jpeg headers on the whole disk/image. I've had simmilar problem few years ago - when I've bought a new hard drive. I had Windows XP with FAT32 filesystem and I was moving my data to new disk and then Windows just simply rebooted - it destroyed all FAT copies and nothing could fix the filesystem. Then PhotoRec helped me to get my photos back. I've get even the ones which I erased myself. Some of them didn't have original names but they were jpegs and PhotoRec has get them, too. I think it can work with NTFS, too. If not PhotoRec, you can try GDB (GetDataBack for NTFS) - it's great tool, too but it's for Windows only and it's commercial application which you've got to buy.

It's strange to see what people have come to expect. Digikam is a photo and image management solution, not a disaster recovery tool. Get your files cleaned up and renamed properly and it will work. If You don't have enough space to copy the files just use find and create a similar folder structure and fill it with symlinks to the original files. Attach .jpg to their names and it will work, no matter which was their original type.

But there are some questions regarding lost tags and using hashs to re-assign image files to names and tags which I find valid to ask for here.

This needs some special advice from a technical person.

My suggestion would be to
(1) keep a backup of the digikam database file in it's current state!!!
(2) then try to recover whatever you can recover with other tools,
(3) and then you may try to get some help from a programmer to try to re-match the data in order not to reenter all tags etc. again.

The database file contains info about the structure of the image folder, filenames, etc., which might indeed be helpful for desaster recovery, so the question of the OP seems legitimate to me.
But every case is different, and even with a specialist there'd still be a lot of manual work to do.

after some thinking i came to the conclusion that the folder structure is not that important as i use mostly the exif and ipct tags to structure the photos. and from april 6th on my company switches to a web-based program. so i tried the brute force method, created a folder and via find filled it with symlinks, replacing all / with _ so they get uniquely named. a short look with dolphin confirms it works but Digikam told me the folder contains only a few dozend photos. then i remembered Ben's suggestion and renamed all the symlinks by adding .jpg to their names and now it works. names and filedates are lost, but since the tags and exif data are still there this can be corrected later on, when i get enough space to copy the files somewhere else.
concerning backups: i only backup my linux hosts regularly as only they have dvd burners which i never got working on windows esp. the bluray burner which lets windows crash when i put it in. i discovered that backups via samba mounts are a bad idea, several times i got damaged files so i gave that up. i had no personal or important files on the windows machine other than my work photos. and if everything fails i _have_ backups of them too, but they would take an eternity to restore, currently almost a thousand dvds.

first of all I want to congratulate! You are all doing great work! And for the last two weeks I checked the release status about a 100 times a day. I am really looking forward to use the latest version.
I am using digikam for about 3 years to manage my personal images and I really appreciate your work!
So now I will join the waiting queue behind "pbhj" and wait for the Kubuntu packages!

Thanks a lot to all digikam developers for creating this outstanding program! I'm looking forward to test 0.10, but honestly, even more looking for to testing the new development version with the growing batch queue manager - will this version now be moved to the usual digikam svn repository?

Congrats for this huge work. I have been trying the beta and RC releases on copies of my photos regularily, it really seems nice. I have a couple of important questions to ask you before using it on my real photos:

-can I write GPS info on RAWs? I don't want to spend time doing it on JPG, it's a complete waste of time for me, especially as I often create several JPG versions of a RAW. I remember you told it should be possible, maybe by activating a special option as writing on RAW is often considered as dangerous.

-is there any way to import photos in a specific directory and sort them in directories per year/month/day ? I plan to switch from Fspot to digikam, but would be nice to be able to keep the same structure for my directories.

Yes, for NEF, DNG, and PEF... for the moment. It's a limitation of Exiv2 library. But work is in progress by Exiv2 team to support new RAW file formats in writing mode...

...But.. you don't care with digiKam, because it store GPS info in database ! you can geolocalize what's you want, and later, when Exiv2 will be improved, synchronize image metadata with digiKam database. There is a tool to batch sync metadata in Tools menu.

::-is there any way to import photos in a specific directory and sort them in directories per year/month/day ?

Metadata DB might do, as long as I can do everything from Digikam, and unfortunately, that won't be the case. Example: I process my RAW with Bibble. So if I geotag my RAW in Digikam, then process it with Bibble, my JPEGs from the photo won't be geotagged, problem :) I can geotag using GPSsync I think, but it does it only from GPS logs. And sometimes I want to manually geotag a photo. I guess I will have to wait until Exiv2 improves enough with CR2 :)

And I know about the calendar view, I was talking about the actual directories where the files are saved. I currently use this structure: /year/month/day/
I would like to keep it with Digikam, but I'm not sure if it can import photos this way. I may use Bibble5 to do the import then, as you can customize the folder structure for import. Then I can have Digikam scan the folders to find all the photos.

...and Qt4! A great day for desktop Linux this is. Digikam is the photo manager that my family keeps going back to, after trying F-Spot, Picasa, and many others. Thanks to Gilles and the rest of the wonderful Digikam devs!

Thank you for this great release!
This program makes the ideal companion for my newly-bought EOS 450D.

BTW: As i am just trying to do some astrophotography, could someone give me a hint on how to get to work Registax 5 under Wine (CVS build on x_86)? My copy likes to crash at the end of stacking, saying "Unable to allocate memory on display 0.0).

I like to see digkam getting more and more powerful, stable and user-friendly for each release. And it is even getting faster. Great work!

But there is one thing I miss and I assume that I am not the only one. Wouldn't it be nice to have a select list in the geolocating window where it is possible to store some (maybe 10) favorite locations? Currently it is quite annoying to enter the coordinates for the studio, at home or a handful number of other locations that most of my pictures usually are made at.
What do you think about it?

Nothing more nothing less than Great Work digiKam Devs! I use digiKam from couple of years and now 0.10.0 from rc1(?) and I'm really satisfied with this project. It's great and I couldn't imagine better tool for my family photo collection. KDE4 port is even better than I could think of before I tried it.
PS. Could you at least make the reply/adding comments here without need of 'Preview'? It would be less time to get through captcha when it would show once, not twice.

Could some kind soul post end-to-end instructions on how to have 0.10.0 installed with Ubuntu 8.10 / GNOME? I understand that some repos need to be added (not sure what the latest set though) and then there's this security key thing (which I don't understand much) after which Synaptic / Aptitude will take care of things .. this is as far as I've gotten after scouring Internet for half a day, but this is not the info I can jump into action with :( Please help!